Family Members

Margaret DeB. "Peg" McAllen, a homemaker and volunteer who enjoyed writing, died May 28 of cancer at Gilchrist Hospice Care. She was 84. Margaret DeBrodt was born in Baltimore and raised in Waverly. She was a 1943 graduate of Eastern High School. She was married in 1946 to Willis "Mac" McAllen, a Chrysler Corp. sales representative, who died in 2000. The couple lived for many years in Wiltondale. Mrs. McAllen moved in 2003 to Aigburth Manor, a Towson retirement home. Throughout her life, Mrs. McAllen enjoyed writing and was a frequent contributor of letters to the editor on a variety of subjects, which were published in The Baltimore Sun. She was also a longtime member of the Wednesday Writers Group.

Karimah Crum lost a beloved uncle to the war in Iraq more than two years ago. She was in middle school then, but mature enough to recognize how much support the Red Cross provided her entire family and grateful enough to give back. She set up "A Penny from the Heart" and pulled her best friends Sydney Young and Kayla Ryan into her fundraising plan. The girls placed collection cans throughout Windsor Mill and Dumbarton middle schools and asked their classmates to contribute spare change to Red Cross bereavement efforts for military families.

Days after four journalists were released from captivity in Libya, a retired schoolteacher in South Baltimore waits anxiously for any word about her son, who went missing in the war-torn country in March. Sharon VanDyke and other family members enlisted the help of Rep. C.A. Dutch Ruppersberger on Monday to raise the profile of 31-year-old Matthew VanDyke's case — and demand that Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi allow him to return home. "This is a major priority when you have an American being held captive, especially based on the situation occurring in Libya," Ruppersberger said during a news conference held in the VanDyke home.

Charles Koblentz, a retired American Trading and Production Co. executive, died April 30 of heart failure at White Plains Hospital in White Plains, N.Y. The former Guilford resident was 93. The son of immigrant parents from Lithuania and Russia, Mr. Koblentz, whose father was a grocer and cigar maker and whose mother was a homemaker, was born and raised in Chicago. He was a 1935 graduate of Tuley High School and earned a bachelor's degree four years later from Chicago's Roosevelt University.

Just after 2 a.m. April 17, Charlie Price realized that David Bayard, his close friend, had left the D.C. nightclub where they'd been partying for a friend's birthday. Where did he go? Price wondered, dialing Bayard's cell. Would he be able to get home? he thought, dialing again. The night was muddled by drinking, and Price can't remember whether they connected. Hours later, a detective told Price his friend had been killed. The 24-year-old University of Maryland graduate student was found dead about 7:30 a.m. in his car, which was parked near a McDonald's in Prince George's County, just a few miles from the club.

A man shot and killed his wife, and then took his own life, inside their Havre de Grace home on Friday, according to the Harford County Sheriff's Office. John Roger Keith Preston, 53, and Frances Blake Preston, 50, were found dead by a family members in their Webster Village area home, according to a police statement. Police were called about 4:15 p.m. to the home in the 100 block of Northway Drive. Sheriff's deputies determined that Preston shot and killed himself after shooting and killing his wife in the living room.

Thomas Fulton, a longtime physics professor at the Johns Hopkins University who swapped notes with the great minds of science, died of heart failure on April 8 at his daughter's home in Ruxton. He was 83. Born Tamas Feuerzeug, in Budapest, Hungary, he immigrated to the United States with his family in 1941 at the age of 14. His immediate family fled Nazis in Hungary and Germany, where many of his other family members died in the Holocaust, and traveled to fascist Spain, where he secured three boat tickets to Cuba by borrowing $100 from a British consular official.